Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

YC reject so I bootstrapped and was thankfully able to hit profitability before my first kid showed up. I’ve now got two. I also have dreams bigger than ever.

In fact, writing this while sitting on the couch with the kids watching Muppet Treasure Island while my kids are wearing pirate hats and waving foam swords.

I’m still extremely productive and prolific. Probably less compared with before. But before, I had friends and TV shows subtracting from my time.

Today, my life priorities are kids, work and sleep.

There is no Netflix. There are no hobbies. No downtime. No friends unless I happen to like my kids friends parents.

I’m up at 5:30/6 and get 90 mins of focused work in. Skip breakfast. Then workout and walk/bike with the kids. Then ready for work at 10 - and thankfully my office is two blocks away. Skip lunch. Home at 5/5:30. Dinner with kids and play. Work from 8-10. Every single day.

I love my kids, work and learning is fun, and I value sleep. Everything else is a nice to have.

The way I see it, when I’m 100 years old I won’t regret drag on my ambitions because I had kids. In fact I’ll probably think the ambitions were nice but kind of pointless in the end anyway. I will see the kids as important and meaningful, and will write a life story where I was the best dad I could be and still hustled like hell.

So you're basically a machine that spends their time working and taking care of your children? This feels like a one-way ticket to a burnout.

I love my work and I love playing with the kids so it can be exhausting but in a good way. Never a drag (not usually anyway).

Super thoughtful consistent schedule with little room for anything else is my tradeoff if I want to maintain high quantity of high quality output with my business. And TBH, it lasts for 15-18 years at most.

I didn’t mention the weekends - those are more of a free for all. Lots of family time, work sneaks in. It’s a lot more thinking than working though.

Burnouts often happen to passionate people who love their work. There are hard limits that conscious part of the mind simply ignores, with laser/tubular focus on whatever is the drive.

For example nurses (both male and female) during WWI - worked themselves to mental breakdowns because there was endless stream of properly suffering people to help or even save. One can't have much more noble goal. Yet hard burnouts kept happening.

I don't want to sound all gloomy since I know nothing about your situation. Just listen to your body and mind, it keeps telling things in subtle ways, not a good idea to ignore that.

This is basically what my life is like (going on 9 years now). I don't think it has necessarily led to burnout for me. Keep in mind that time spent with your children isn't all work. There is some fun and leisure in there as well (although it is a lot of work too).

Agreed. This sounds like absolute hell. No time for even a single hobby? Where's your pleasure in life?

Isn’t it unhealthy to skip both breakfast and lunch? How are you getting the energy to do stuff without eating?

Yeah I had a schedule like that when the kids were very young but it caught up with me, frankly. Having the computer be the first and last thing I interacted with every day was not great for my mood either.

Granted, I do need to take a break from that schedule every so often. If I catch myself being unfocused I just go to bed.

Also, the first thing I work on is usually a high leverage project that excites me. Reading news or answering emails (things that can affect my emotions) are usually avoided during that time. Usually.

> Isn’t it unhealthy to skip both breakfast and lunch?

No, why would you think that?

hey hey don't interrupt the hustleporn

Oh no you see this is now called intermittent fasting not "lunch is for wimps".

Intermittent fasting and calorie reduction are the only known way to EXTEND lifespan and wellness. 10 years of low carb + fasting is the single most important health decision I have ever made.

Kind of a strong statement there. Happy that fasting’s had such a positive influence on your life but:

No: fasting has not been proven to extend lifespan in humans.

Also no: exercise has been far more provably correlated with healthspan improvements than fasting.

You are more correct, but I think the truth lies somewhere between your statement and theirs. We have correlative evidence that lower calorie diets and/or fasting results in longer lifespans, improved insulin sensitivity, pancreatic cell responsiveness, blood pressure, oxidative-stress measures, and more, in humans. We also have animal testing showing causative evidence that fasting produces longer lifespans. Of course, animals are not humans, and correlation does not imply causation. Still, we do not currently have causative evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, and we widely agree that that is harmful for lungs. With enough correlative evidence I think it becomes reasonable to accept it as actionable evidence.

Nit: Humans are animals, but those animals were not humans

You’re right of course, I was more responding to the very matter-of-fact “only known” phrasing.

It's only unhealthy if you get hungry.

Wellllll, kind of... I've realized hunger is often just another habit because we're used to eating N meals a day, like the GP comment implies. I've done a quasi OMAD (1-meal a day) thing on-and-off for 3+ years now and don't feel hungry the rest of the time, given my current physical activity levels. It took a few days to get used to, but now I can start and stop OMAD on demand.

I'd recommend everyone try fasting and figure out what their bodies really need (preferably over the holidays, because the adjustment period can be a bit rough and could interfere with work.) I suspect most of the developed world is over-eating by quite a lot given our largely sedentary lifestyles.

I did fasting for a while, usually fasting for 16+ hours and eating 1-2 meals in the eight hour feeding window, but eventually stopped in favour of working out. I'd like to be able to lift while also fasting, but I'm worried that (1) I'd struggle to hit my protein targets and (2) only eating during a small window each day would hurt muscle growth.

Oh for sure, if your physical activity is higher you need to eat commensurately more! What I meant is, for most of us with desk jobs and little physical activity, our bodies need surprisingly little food and this is what fasting reveals.

Like even on OMAD I pretty much don't lose any weight (and no, I'm not as lean as I wish I were!) I strongly suspect if average, healthy people cut out an entire meal a day and changed nothing else, their bodies would stay mostly the same.

As a fun project, you should look up the history of eating schedules. They vary wildly between different cultures. Some have a single large meal at the start of the day, others have 5 smaller meals spread through, and everything in between. There is no standard even if it feels like it simply because that is how we are raised.

It is but social convention.

Social and historical conventions don’t necessarily align with “good for your health”.

Most "good for your health" advice is pop culture driven with a half life of 5 years anyway and breakfast being the most important meal of the day is a marketing slogan. In other words, no better than any various convention.

About the only things that stick are "don't stop physical and mental activity as you age" and "do stuff in moderation".

If you call it "intermittent fasting" and write a book about it, you can get a whole movement behind how healthy skipping breakfast and lunch is. And another movement preaching about how bad it is. And a followup book about what you REALLY should do ad nauseam.

Pretty much, so much of what we take for granted in culture was actually intentionally designed from the top down to have masses of people fall into line and become good servants of the economic system.

As for good diets, for instance, there is a wild meal schedule that has shown to be fairly good at managing weight, it is just intense. It is the 16 to 17 meals a day plan. One meal every hour you are awake, each one only about 100 to 150 calories. It does potentially work but try selling it to people and worse getting folks to stick to it.

>intentionally designed from the top down

not designed, evolved

Social behavior and the actual behaviors themselves evolved through populations as, among other things, an information storage mechanism that survives generations.

Agreed. This view also makes sense if we look at pre-agriculture humans - they’d eat heartily when there’s a good catch, maybe eat some leftovers the next day, go without food for some time, etc. Evolution by natural selection doesn’t move fast enough for humans to have adapted strongly to a fixed 3 meals a day schedule by now; eating times are still very much a convention.

High protein breakfast is the easiest way to hit a protein goal

"hitting a protein goal" being one of the current health fads I'm talking about

surely the natural response here will be about how important, healthy, and real this particular fad is. same as all the other health fads everyone would talk about for the last hundred years

The secret is to have your children eat for you, then just do blood transfusions when they’re at peak nutrient level. You can do that while you work for optimal efficiency.

No idea but worth remembering that modern breakfast was invented to sell cereal.

break-fast is for farmer that do hard work

Your body has energy reserves that it can use when you aren't eating.

Man good motivating schedule. Are you married as well? I notice this is missing the wife time. I feel like I really have to wreck my sleep to get worktime between wife and kids.

> There are no hobbies. No downtime. No friends unless I happen to like my kids friends parents.

this sounds miserable

I appreciate people like OP because they create jobs for people like me. I am more than happy to let him keep his profits and his lousy existence while I take it easy, do some work and then hang out with kids and friends and collect the paycheck. Yeah, I will never get rich, but I don't care. Work is just something I do to get by, I did find meaning in it earlier in life, but since I hit 40 work is just a thing I do so I don't end up under the bridge.

Not just miserable, but also unhealthy for the kids - You're really not going to teach your kids to socialize?

Beyond that, he's admitting he's ignoring the kids to post hustleporn on HN instead of engaging with them.

My block is crawling with kids and usually playing baseball or hockey - they are pretty much never on screens apart from watching something on Disney+. Other than that we play outside year round.

Really just thoughtfully and consistently disciplined. Some people think diet and exercise are miserable. Others put more weight on how they feel when in good health.

Where do you fit all the other things that come into life randomly?

Helping aging parents? Dealing with problems? House chores? House maintenance?

Props if you can do this and not burn out. I would not be able to live like this.

I noticed housework wasn’t mentioned in this idealized schedule.

I noticed the same. Housework consumes a LOT of my time. But maybe that's just because of income level and failure to delegate?

But time to post on HN?

He posts less than once a week so yes

Friends "distracting"? Man, that sounds backwards. Work, skip breakfast on purpose, work until 10pm... Nah. That's not a good place.

When do you spend time with your spouse lol

so your first meal of the day is at 5pm? and you manage to workout and attend work all day on no food?

I can't say is this sarcasm or is this guy serious?

yep all of this resonates

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